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grammar fascist writes "CNN reports that Northrop Grumman is under contract to build a new supersonic, shape-shifting bomber by 2020. The main innovation is in its single, rotating wing. From the article: '[It] will cruise with its 200-foot-long wing perpendicular to its engines like a normal airplane. But just before the craft breaks the sound barrier, its single wing will swivel around 60 degrees (hence the name) so that one end points forward and the other back. This oblique configuration redistributes the shock waves that pile up in front of a plane at Mach speeds and cause drag. When the Switchblade returns to subsonic speeds, the wing will rotate back to perpendicular.'"

So, having one part of the plane change its angle is now shape shifting? WOW. My laptop is a shapeshifter, because the lid opens. My car must be a shape shifter too, the sunroof can take several positions!

"So, having one part of the plane change its angle is now shape shifting?"

No. Rotating the wings so that the entire shape of the plane makes it a shape shifter. This one goes from looking like a plane to looking like a knife, as opposed ot F-14 that just changes to look more like a dart.

Though I agree with your underwhelmment over the name and the description, cripes, your examples suck. Understand what you're poo-poo'ing.

"No, it goes from looking like a plane to looking like a plane with the wings on a funny angle."

From TFA:

When completed (target date: 2020), it will cruise with its 200-foot-long wing perpendicular to its engines like a normal airplane. But just before the craft breaks the sound barrier, its single wing will swivel around 60 degrees (hence the name) so that one end points forward and the other back.

Let's continue to invest in war, because as we all know, war is good business, right?

At least war pays for pure R&D and cutting edge science. Seems shareholders are only interested in only doing research that will generate revenue on a quarterly basis. Unfortunate that war (or the preparation/avoidance of war) is the driver, but the cutting edge avionics and composite technologies I enjoy as an aviation hobbyist were born from that 'war machine'. Someday we might not - but I don't see it changing anytime soon.

WOuldn't it be more efficient to take the war out of it and spend the money on pure R&D? Better yet why not just provide incentives for private enterprise to do R&D and give the money back to the taxpayers? How about R&D through the space program? Wouln't that be better then making new bombers to drop bombs on miami on a band of al-quada sypathisers?

I can imagine how useful this weapon will be to drop bombs on big cities in the US which have terrorist cells in them.

As much as no one likes war, it is a goal to work towards that helps in the R&D of new technologies. I mean, if I were to tell you "Go out and invent something cool." you'd probably make something interesting. But if I told you "We need to beat these guys!" People generally get a lot more fired up. They tend to focus on the problem at hand and come up with possible solutions, in this case, going faster. It always helps to have some sort of focus.
Now, a similar thing occured when we had

They talked about a design like this in Popular Science Magazine. Before I graduated from High School. In 1980.

And that was due to Burt Rutan building and showing off the AD-1 in the late 70s / early 80s. Show a prototype concept vehicle, and people's minds start racing at the possibilities. The problem was, it was difficult to fly, so the design needed a little time on the shelf to allow AI concepts and processing power time to catch up. 40 years after proving the concept (assuming this program isn't cu

Medicare is getting slashed? Congress just passed the largest increase in Medicare spending in decades (Prescription Drug Program).

Were you just posting the Daily Kos talking points without thinking? Just because you keep quoting these talking points as facts doesn't mean they will automagically become facts.

Yes, the deficit is rising and the gov't is spending more for craptastic social programs. Military spending is still ~4% GDP, so I really don't have a problem with that. Of course, I don't have a problem with our gov't safeguarding us and preventing another 3,000 of our citizens from being killed by terrorists, but I guess I'm not blinded by hatred of our President. Win at all costs, that's the mantra of the Kossacks, isn't it?

Point of fact, Kos is primarily a political tactician and not prone to making unbased assertions. These are not points he would make.

OTOH, which social programs are "craptastic," pray tell? As for our government protecting us from terrorists, I hardly see how this ridiculous boondoggle has anything to do with that, any more than the Crusader artillery piece or the new class of destroyers are meant to fight terrorism.

The current group of fanatics we are fighting feels anyone who is not a member of their culture/religion is not worthy to live and must be killed. They would be trying to destroy us even if we stood in the corner with our hands in our pockets, and they are doing this even to people who sympathize with them. As for the government spending money on R&D and production, every penny of your money the government spends on R&D and production ends up in the paychecks of the employees and shareholders associated with the companies that got the contracts.

The current group of fanatics we are fighting feels anyone who is not a member of their culture/religion is not worthy to live and must be killed. They would be trying to destroy us even if we stood in the corner with our hands in our pockets, and they are doing this even to people who sympathize with them.

Your statement is correct as far as it goes, but what you've failed to realize is that "the current group of fanatics" is not a fixed set of people. Like the particles of water vapor that form a cloud, there are constantly individuals entering and leaving the "set of fanatics", and its appearance as a fixed object is an illusion. Like a cloud, its size will grow or shrink depending on the environment around it. Which is why so much of the USA's recent actions have been not only ineffective but counterproductive: if a military operation kills N terrorists, but inspires (more than N) people who were previously non-combatants to become terrorists, then our effort in that operation has actually harmed us more than doing nothing would have.

The "War On Terror" is not some video game where you can win simply by killing until there are no 'baddies' to kill. It is a political struggle for the hearts and minds of humanity. The terrorists know this, and use it to their advantage. It's time we did the same. When the bulk of the world can't tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" anymore, the terrorists are winning.

The current group of fanatics we are fighting feels anyone who is not a member of their culture/religion is not worthy to live and must be killed. They would be trying to destroy us even if we stood in the corner with our hands in our pockets, and they are doing this even to people who sympathize with them.

This is complete and utter bullshit. While I imagine there are some fanatics out there who feel that people who are not a member of their culture/religion must be killed, I would wager that a good number of them live in the US. The primary beef folks in the Midle East have with American policy is that we blatantly and unreasonably yield to Israeli policy at the expense of the Arab population. The western world considers the Arab world with general contempt stretching back to the time after WWI when the west drew up borders and established puppet leaderships. The global population in general rejects the strong brand of American superiority and cultural hegemony that is imposed by fiat on what are supposed to be locally-goverened democracies. Funny thing--many Americans are fed up with this too, albeit on subtler levels.

As for the government spending money on R&D and production, every penny of your money the government spends on R&D and production ends up in the paychecks of the employees and shareholders associated with the companies that got the contracts.

Aside from the fact that most of the money for these contracts DOES NOT EVEN EXIST AND IS MERELY DEBT TO BE PASSED ON TO FUTURE GENERATIONS, money could still be spent on R&D for peaceful purposes. You know, things like shelter and food. Buckminster Fuller's vision of a world without material need is a technological possibilty. Unfortunately it's not politically as profitable as war. Profiting from war is a true moral low, but quite beneficial for the Inner Party.

Let's continue to invest in war, because as we all know, war is good business, right?

You couldn't be more right, if there wasn't a cold war with the USSR, why would we need a nuke proof network like DARPA NET? And we can see the real impact of that on business, I think all the fortune 500 companies use it as one of their primary ways of making a profit.

If you are going to open your yap the least you can do is make sure it is informed and walking all over your current actions.

Ok- I was wrong about the UK, but get real on the others. Besides- the 2005 average for the EU as a whole was over 9%, with the larger economies of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain all higher than that of the US... (Luxembourg?!? Major European economy? Are you kidding?)

And where do you get "fascist" from? Do you even know what that word means? You really need more than a knee-jerk intellect to be using political terminology, so you don't end up just diluting the definitions.

And where do you get "fascist" from? Do you even know what that word means?

To be fair, fascist just mean some one who believes in a strong powerful government over everything else. We just made it a dirty word after WWII because Itality referred themselves as such.

Of course National Socialism isn't a bad economic policy for a government to have either, but no one would dare use the phrase when talking about modern day governments.

But still it derides the point that our economy is most likley doing really good right now because of massive military and government spending... Actually kind of like National Socialist Germany in the 1930's. However, such an economy is not sustainable in the long term.

Germany invaded other countries and looted them and used slave labor to make up for this problem, wheras our war economy just throws it into the big pile of national debt and sell it off to China, Japan, and other places.

If tomorrow Japan and China decide to either A.) Stop buying debt or B.) Demand their debts back ASAP we'd be hosed.

Of course they'd be hosed too when the world market economy collapses so for right now they keep buying and profiting on our massive spending.

Your post above? Corporatism, check. Extreme nationalism, check. Militarism, check. Anti-communism and anti-liberalism? Check and check. All you're lacking is explicit advocacy of the police state that currently says which natural substances you are and aren't allowed to enjoy in the privacy of your own home (not that I'm pro-marijuana, but the fact that the Federal government thinks it should have any authority there is pretty totalitarian).

I had done a quick google search and used figures brought up by the BBC. European unemployment rates similar to the U.S. unemployment rate:Austria - 4.8% Britain - 5.3% Denmark - 4.8% Netherlands - 5.7% Sweden - 5.5% Switzerland - 3.3%

The overall unemployment rate in the Euro zone is 8% (this is in large part due to high reported unemployment in Germany and France, explained above, 11.0% and 9.3% respectively). However, the Euro zone unemployment rate reduced by.7% from last year's rate, compared with the U.S. unemployment rate, which reduced.5%.

Not to be a total jackass, but I really do have to rub this in your face: the Scandinavian countries have historically had the lowest unemployment (historically lower than that of the United States) and STILL have the largest welfare system of all of Europe. If that doesn't provide a counterexample to your nonsensical "Everyone benefits from a dog-eat-dog world" blind faith in Capitalism-as-God, I don't know what does.

the Scandinavian countries have historically had the lowest unemployment (historically lower than that of the United States) and STILL have the largest welfare system of all of Europe.

Sure, they do, but at what price? Hint: Swedes and Finns don't move to Spain after they retire for the sunshine alone. I lived for several months in Sweden years ago. Taxes were so high that junior engineers couldn't afford a car, one guy I met had a two-cylinder thing made by Citroen. In Finland a popular car was the Wartbur

Except that it's false to say "Americans can afford to drive SUVs." What you really mean -- unless you intend to deceive people -- is that SOME Americans can afford to drive SUVs. Many others (thirty-eight million Americans) have "insufficient income to provide the food, shelter and clothing needed to preserve health" (Figures from the Census Bureau, definition quoted from the Orshansky Thresholds used thereby).

I think there are fewer than thirty-eight million SUV drivers in the United States. If I'm right, then from a purely quantitative perspective, the Swedes have a better standard of living than a purely capitalist United States would have.

the Scandinavian countries have historically had the lowest unemployment (historically lower than that of the United States) and STILL have the largest welfare system of all of Europe.
While this is true, it is unfortunately just a tautology: It is possible to have a low unemployment and many people working in the welfare system by offering the unemployed a job in the public sector.

(...)from a purely quantitative perspective, the Swedes have a better standard o

Because when Wartburg was a popular car in Finland, it would date to 1950s, that would make you a really old slashdotter. Mayby you are mixing Wartburg with Lada? Lada was a soviet made car which was also imported to Finland, but it was never popular, and if you mixed those two, then it would date you to 1980s.

Thought, you are quite right about the fact that having and driving a car in both Sweden and Finland is very expensive, but that's because the car taxes double the cars price and gasolines price, which btw. is just right, because personal driving is expensive to goverment (roads) and to enviroment (polution) and thus taxes should be taken to compensate those costs. Now days there thought is talk about moving to strictly taxing gasoline, and not cars, that would be logical, and it would make people think more about having a own car when a liter would cost from 2 to 3. The reason why americans are driving SUVs is because US goverment is subsidizing personal driving, by not taxing car owners the cost that are associated with using cars.

On a note, I too think that scandinavian countries tax too much, and there is too much goverment control, our unemployment rate is too high, and the official numbers are cleaned by putting people in to education and to early pension. Thought, I think that american system isn't the answer, thought it has some good points, the society should take care of it's weaks and unfortunates, and provide a minimum level of living, that is the only way in which we can say that everybody is in the same line in life and that people try and take risk in their lifes, without worrying ending up in the street.

PS. The most popular car in Finland in now days is Toyota, same too in america, or it will be soon;-)

I believe you will find an extremely large differential in the cost of maintaining 1 mile of road in Nevada compared to say...Minnesota (and the Scandinavian countries). Heat in nevada is nothing. Snow and ice, potholes, and the army of men to clean the roads of said ice and snow is a whole different ball of wax. Also, any and all road construction must be done during only half the year. There are two seasons in Minnesota: Winter, and Road Construction. Both are quite costly for the Dept. of Transporat

I'll resist the urge to be sarcastic, and just note that you simply cherrypicked the countries you wanted. In any list of European countries, I think I would have started with Germany (10.6%), then France (10.1%), then, let's see, I guess Italy (8.6%), then I suppose Spain (10.4%), then England etc. I mean, really, Portugal? LUXEMBOURG!?!?

National defense is mandated but is spending billions on a program which is useless against terrorist mandated too?

I am all for defense. I do object to waging war for fun and profit though. Where is it mandated that the US taxpayers should get rid of every two bit dictator with oil while making nice with dictators in pakistan and africa?

I think when this monster comes screaming in at several times the speed of sound, scattering thousands of pounds of explosives behind it in an orgy of death and destruction, "Silent" is probably not the adjective that the survivors (if any) will use to describe it.

Last time I checked, the US literacy rate was 99%. Our neighbor to the north - spending considerably less on it's military - has something like 97%. So much for that correlation. I think it's safe to say that the US military budget would not go towards education in any case.

Isn't that funny? I googled and found lots of different numbers. My favorite of the ones I found was this one [canadainfolink.ca], which carries the footnote: "Literacy is defined differently by different countries, groups and individuals.The whole topic is a mine field."

Anyway, the place I got my original numbers from was here. [overpopulation.com]

Oh, I'm all for a good military, but is there never a limit to what the military really needs? The Air Force already has a long-range strategic bomber (the B-52), a supersonic bomber (the B-1) and a hideously expensive stealth bomber (the B-2). No other country in the world has an arsenal like this, so do we really need a supersonic stealth bomber that's going to cost the taxpayer untold billions of dollars? If we're so desperate to get along with our neighbors (Europe, India, China), why do we have to keep

So, it never hurts to spend even more money on an even bigger stick? That sounds like something that a lobbyist for Northrop Grumman would say. Come, on; there have to be limits. Besides, this particular kind of big stick is completely useless against today's home-grown terrorists. And little guys like Saddam Hussein are completely overwhelmed by the weapons that we already have. Also, waving a big stick around like that can be seen as a sign of insecurity.

Last time I checked, the US literacy rate was 99%. Our neighbor to the north - spending considerably less on it's military - has something like 97%. So much for that correlation.

According to the Human Development Reports [undp.org], the US and Canada are basically tied on the educational front. Both have such high literacy rates that they don't bother to collect detailed national statistics, so UNESCO gives both a 99% rate. On the other hand, Canada's life expectancy from birth is 80.0 years, and the US's is 77.4 years.

I think it's safe to say that the US military budget would not go towards education in any case.

Agreed. That doesn't mean it shouldn't go there though. Or, why not put it towards healthcare and get our life expectancy rates up?

Do all hippies think that we don't need a military?

Can't speak for hippies, having not talked to many in my life; but some of us regular people think we could reduce spending to a mere $100 billion, spend the other $400 billion on health, education, infrastructure, etc., and still have more than enough power to defend our country from anyone else in the world. We outspend the next 20 countries combined---we don't need to spend that much.

Thank you for being rational:) And this after my inciteful hippy remark:)

I disagree with you on most of your points, however.

First, I think our military might be sized right, but also might be underfunded. Why? We can barely keep an occupying force together in one country of 24 million. Imagine if there was another flash-point somewhere? Shouldn't we have a standing force large enough to handle that? Maybe not, but I think it's not an unreasonable discussion to have. Someone else earlier in the thread s

Percentage of GDP is not a better metric for military spending. The US can get more firepower for 4% of GDP than Tahiti can get for 50%. In armed conflict, it is absolute firepower that matters, not firepower as a percentage of GDP.

Or, if you want, compare total dolars spent on education in other countries to how much is spent in the US. I gaurantee that the US outspends all of them on that front too, and by a large margin.

In this case, the percentage matters more than absolute dollars. Education is s

some of us regular people think we could reduce spending to a mere $100 billion, spend the other $400 billion on health, education, infrastructure, etc., and still have more than enough power to defend our country from anyone else in the world. We outspend the next 20 countries combined---we don't need to spend that much.

Then regular people like yourself need to open their eyes.

We could spend much less than we do now and defend our nation from any "real" threat- that is true- but most of our military spending is not to defend us from threats. The U.S. spends so much on the armed forces for the same reason that at one point the U.S.S.R had enough nukes to destroy the entire planet a few times over- we want to make the idea of (a major nation) going against us in any significant way (as in more than "we don't support what you are doing") a horrifying thought. We want to have so much power that the rest of the world is FORCED to follow our lead or pay the price for getting in front.

China and India have over a billion people each. The economic force of such numbers mean that realistically THEY should be the superpowers, not us. But they (in my lifetime) will not dare challenge the authority of the U.S. because they know that we have a millitary that can take them back to the stone ages if they cross us. Because of our military, we get access to cheaper and more resources than they do (Iraq oil anyone?) Because of our military, we will stay on top of the world long after when we should no longer be.

There is also that whole "military spending leads to domestic jobs" thing as well.

The U.S. spends so much on the armed forces for the same reason that at one point the U.S.S.R had enough nukes to destroy the entire planet a few times over- we want to make the idea of (a major nation) going against us in any significant way (as in more than "we don't support what you are doing") a horrifying thought. We want to have so much power that the rest of the world is FORCED to follow our lead or pay the price for getting in front.

Of course that's why we spend so much. But some of us don't think we should bully the rest of the world into following our lead. I don't really care what another country does, as long as they don't actively seek to harm our country. Deterant is good enough, and we can achieve that without spending $500 Billion.

There is also that whole "military spending leads to domestic jobs" thing as well.

Which is a toothless argument, because almost any field we spend $500 Billion on can generate domestic jobs.

Which is a toothless argument, because almost any field we spend $500 Billion on can generate domestic jobs.

Yes, but to spend $500 billion on the military and thus create jobs is sound fiscal policy. To spend $500 billion on any other programs of any kind and thus create an equal number of jobs is to perpetuate the welfare state, which is socialism.

Similarly, to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq is an appropriate use of US tax money. However, to rebuild any infrastructure in the US would be socialism.

Similarly, we have a responsibility to free the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's tyranny because those people deserve human rights and we have a leadership role when it comes to human rights in the world. However, we can inprison them indefinitely without trial, and interrogate them with what would be considered torture in the US, because they are not Americans, and it's not the responsibility of the US government to secure human rights for non-Americans.

Keep going over those basic arguments until you've memorized them. It might help to print them out and carry them around with you, in case you don't have 24/7 access to Fox News.

We want to have so much power that the rest of the world is FORCED to follow our lead or pay the price for getting in front.

I agree. Our military spending prevented 9/11 from happening. And boy, did we whip bin Laden's ass for even thinking about it! We put his shrunken head on the Washington Monument! Let that shit be a lesson to all you terrorisms!

Put another way: You think Bush dropping his pants and waving his tiny little nuclear warhead around is going to scare the religious jihadists? We're talking RELIGIOUS WINGNUT SUICIDE BOMBERS here. They don't care what happens to the rest of the world after they leave it. They think, for whatever reason, that they're doing the work of their god. Imagine if Hannity had an army of fervent followers who would be willing and eager to literally die for him.

China and India have over a billion people each. The economic force of such numbers mean that realistically THEY should be the superpowers, not us. But they (in my lifetime) will not dare challenge the authority of the U.S. because they know that we have a millitary that can take them back to the stone ages if they cross us. Because of our military, we get access to cheaper and more resources than they do (Iraq oil anyone?) Because of our military, we will stay on top of the world long after when we should no longer be.

Put down the crack pipe and the Tiger Balm, Rush. Who do you think is buying the debt that is used to pay for our military misadventures? I can't believe it's not... CHINA! Yes!

Newsflash, O'Falafel: Thanks to the Bush Administration's wanton spending spree, China could crash our economy into a zillion little shards . They have a strong economic incentive not to do that, but they could if they so chose. Bush and Cheney have given them that power over us.

We want to have so much power that the rest of the world is FORCED to follow our lead or pay the price for getting in front.

So basically, you're saying that the US is a greedy bully. Look, I appreciate the advances that military spending has given the general population (DARPA, avionics, TANG) but this is ridiculous. It is this attitude that imperils our safety more than anything. Guerilla techniques render much of our military infrastructure obsolete. Do you think the Chinese don't realize this? I expect since this thread seems to be moderated by the pro-war crowd, this comment will be below the threshhold. It's too bad, because I happen to be right.

We are not being defeated by the weakest nation in the Middle East.We simply have no concept of what we are doing there and hence noway to define victory. If we wanted their land - that's easy.If we wanted their women - again, easy. If we wanted their childrenfor breakfast Mike Tyson style - no problem. The problem is thatwe went in with no metric of what victory means. Conversely,we cannot be defeated because there is no metric for failure. Wewent in, killed whoever we wanted, captured some high level guys

Yes, because hippies are merely a convenient straw-man caricature for you to mock. So they'll believe any dumb-ass thing you want them to in order to make you look like you're winning the argument.

I'm not a hippie myself though, so my view is that we do need a military: one about one tenth the size of what we have now. The reason our military keeps growing year and year and STILL can't keep up with our demands on it is that it generates its own demand:

The US already spends more on education per student than essentially any other industrialized nation. If there is a problem with education, it is not in how much money is spent. What you said makes a trite soundbite, but neither identifies a real problem nor suggests a useful solution.

Contrary to popular belief, the Americans spend a lot more on public education (~$600B) than on defense. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is at historical lows and declining even with the military misadventures (3.

The first to prove that such a wing has minimum wave drag was R.T. Jones (1951). More recently, inviscid CFD calculations proved that the best performances are obtained with a wing of aspect-ratio 10:1 with a cruise CL=0.068. The best yaw angle would be 68 degrees, and the wing would have the flying operation shown in Fig. 1 below.

I recall seeing a NASA test plane with a swiveling wing at the EAA OSHKOSH airshow back in the early 80's. It was one place, jet powered, and was flown in the airshow with the wing rotated to a fairly steep angle several times. It was a proof of concept to explore control issues and to prove that the wing need not be swept BACK on both sides to improve aerodynamics at high speeds. They referred to is as the AD-1", an oblique wing aircraft [fi.edu].

You beat me to Googling this earlier attempt,
but what you get from actually RTFA is that they metion this 1979 atempt and it involed
none other than Burt Ratan! (SpaceShip One fame)

The 1979 attempt was hard and unintuitive to control, but the drone attempt will not
rely on ingrained pilot intincts and automatically control the pitch over that happens when say you nose the plane up.

The control issues were also the subject of a well-regarded Ph.D. Thesis at Stanford in the early 1990's. The original NASA aircraft had the axis of wing rotation vertical in level, forward flight. The pivot joint was at the wingspan centerline.

The conclusions of the Ph.D. thesis was that one gets a much more controllable AD-1 if one modifies the wing / fuselage configuration as follows:

1. Tilt the pivot axis a few degrees away from the side of the aircraft that has the forward sweep of the wing.

2. The wing needs to be mounted a few percent off its centerline (that's right, an asymmetric configuration).

3. A couple other conclusions that I can not recall (anhedral / dihedral; spanwise changing airfoil; etc)?.

Note: This was an analysis of the AD-1. The fuselage / wing interactions drove quite a bit of the specific stability / control based modifications. If one has a different fuselage (for example, the illustration in the CNN article), the specifics will change.

For one thing, it's a much simpler mechanism. As other posters have said, maintenance on the F-14 and like aircraft is very high. Traditional swing wings have two points of rotation which must be synchronized, whereas this has only one (that probably cuts the weight of the mechanism in half, too). It's probably stealthier, too, since the wing doesn't retract into a big groove in the side of the fuselage.

With the upgrades done over the years, it still the the best carrier fighter we have.

With the upgrades done over the years, it still the the best carrier fighter we don't have.

Fixed that for ya. They've been decomissioned since March.

It has range, computer power, ability to lock onto six different targets at the same time and shoot them all down, and doesn't need to be pointed at the bogeys after the missles are fired. The F-18 Hornet is a short range fighter, and has to keep itself pointed in the general direction of the bogeys until the missles hit.

Incorrect, to my knowledge. Fire-and-forget is based on the weaponry, not the platform firing it. Just about every air-to-air weapon - the only exception being the AIM-7 Sparrow, which is being phased out for the AMRAAM - the F/A-18 launches is fire-and-forget and doesn't require external guidance from the launching aircraft. It can carry more payload, too, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

IIRC, the AMRAAM is only really fire-and-forget at short range, at longer ranges it needs the launching aircraft to keep tracking the target and provide course updates until the missile gets close enough to use its own radar. Otherwise it just flies towards where the target would be if it didn't change course, which is pretty unlikely.

Oh, and just on the whole locking up 6 aircraft and shooting them all down from huge ranges - that would be the phoenix missile.

Unfortunately, it's good against un-manouverable bomber/strike aircraft, but against a modern fighter-bomber, it's not able to turn well enough.

Don't mistake me for a tomcat hater - I think it's a way better plane overall than the superpig, but there were several fairly good reasons it's been retired.... yet another one being that the airframes are simply getting too old, and g

The F-18 Hornet is a short range fighter, and has to keep itself pointed in the general direction of the bogeys until the missles hit.

Most if not all F-18 fighters will have the AIM 120 missile which AFAIK has a two phased guidance procedure. The missile get's the target's location and a rough course uploaded to it by the launching aircraft moments prior to launch. After that, during the first guidance phase, the missile only recieves updates which it uses to adjust the initial uploaded course from the launching aircraft. During the second, terminal phase the missiles own radar locks onto the target and the pilot can move on leaving the missile to guide it self. Theoretically the Aim-120 is a fire and forget weapon even at long range but in practice, if the launching aircraft keeps illuminating the target with his radar through out the first phase, the hit probability will increase considerably especially against fast and highly maneuverable targets like Mig-29s, Su-27/30s, J-10s... never mind something like a Trance 3 Eurofighter with thrustvectoring engines. The launch aircraft does not have to illuminate the target until impact. Interestingly enough the F-14 is slated to be replaced by A/F-18 Super Hornet fighters packing the shorter range AIM-120 missile later this year. Even so the F-18/AIM-120 combination is not really a competitor for the F-14 which, combined with it's Phoenix missles, is still a pretty potent weapons that has few if any peers at the moment since the Russians have apparently stopped developing the MiG-31 at the pace that would have been needed to keep it competitive due to the enormous costs and the Eurofighter and F-22 are still being deployed.

Funny, I don't recall ever seeing such an inflammatory title on a/. story in years. Just because the plane is a bomber? Come on now, the technology is cool, even if this is a bit outdated (I've got a swing-wing Estes rocket from when I was a kid, sitting on the shelf right over my desk, for crying out loud...). No need to make a political statement like this - let's keep the discussion a bit more civil, please.

While projects like this can easily be seen as waste, they do a couple things.
This money goes to create hi tech jobs, rewarding people for getting engineering/science/sometimes computing degrees, potentially supporting universities themselves.
These projects generate knowledge by testing out technologies and supporting businesses or universities that sponsor research.

In my opinion, this is not waste, even if the end product never comes to be.

Certainly, this can only go so far, you wouldn't want all your money going to high tech / low success projects, but it is reasonable to have money going towards these things.

Having perused the posts that have been made so far, I'm a bit surprised that everyone is concentrating on the aerospace engineering aspects of the plane. To me, the more interesting facet of this is the idea of having a huge supersonic aircraft loaded with cruise missles and potentially nuclear weapons with no one in the cockpit.I wish articles like this would focus more on the communications, AI, and general catasrophe-tolerance of the systems that go into a craft like this. There have to be some intere

Because massive sideway forces that can't possibly be balanced over the whole length of the wing, and asymmetrically applied lifting forces ARE COOL, especially on a plane that has to cover great distances and carry heavy bombs. I have a better idea -- why don't they just fly a bomber sideways?

This seems more like the kind of thing that should be developed under a cloak of secrecy at Area 51. My guess is that it's seen as an outside shot by DARPA, and the $10.3m pocket change they're throwing at it convinces me even more that they're just using this as "gosh ain't we high-tech and futuristic" publicity (or propaganda if you'd rather) blurb.

What seals it though is the 1950's Buck Rogers shiny treatment. Any self-respecting supersonic bomber has to have a mat-black paint job, surely?

People are saying this isn't new, it was tested by NASA in the 1980s following research in the 1970s. Well, IIRC, It was Barnes Wallis who developed this concept for supersonic aircraft in the 1950s. He was British, which I guess is why you 'mericans pathologically overlook his work. In fact if it wasn't for the Brits handing over all their supersonic research as part of a post-war deal (fair enough I guess, we needed your money to rebuild our country and the rest of Europe), you probably would have been beaten to the punch for breaking the sound barrier in the first place.

Mind you, BW was against the TSR-2 and so lent a lot of clout the US argument against that effort, so he's got some brownie points against him in my book. But that's an argument for another day.

The reason it's hard is that now all the control moments are linked -- you can't roll the plane without causing pitch and yaw changes too. So you need to control all the surfaces in unison. This makes it complicated and hard to fly, but not necessarilly unstable. That's why there's a computer flying it, not a person -- once they get a good model of how it behaves, applying all the corrections at once isn't a hard thing for a computer.

Compare the fictional Valkyrie specifications with the real one. The XB-70 could take off with a gross weight of 250 tons, and had a range of 8000 kilometers at Mach 3. It had variable geometry too. At subsonic speeds the wings were flat [fas.org]. At supersonic speeds wing tips folded down [fas.org], to keep the lift constant at all speeds.